I woke as much as the cellphone ringing simply after 5 a.m. in Portland. My colleague was calling from the East Coast. “Lindz, it’s BG. She’s been taken into custody on the airport. She has her cellphone and may textual content.” Brittney Griner, who had spent a number of WNBA offseasons starring for UMMC Ekaterinburg, an elite Russian basketball membership workforce, had been touring again to Ekaterinburg from the U.S., connecting in Moscow when she was detained. She was now within the custody of Russian officers on the airport and, for the following a number of hours, I tracked her location on my cellphone and continued texting her, making an attempt to stick with her so long as I might.
Staying together with her was what Brittney had requested me to do after I began representing her as her sports activities agent proper out of school in 2013. Although she was projected to be the No. 1 decide general within the WNBA draft, crucial dialog we had early on wasn’t about endorsements or fame. From my expertise within the enterprise, I knew that success on the court docket for girls has by no means been sufficient to ensure girls comparable business rewards to males. Solely girls athletes considered conventionally lovely by a Western normal, “female” — or just perceived to be straight, who have been each white and sometimes much less essential, profitable at successful, bought any trace of endorsement alternatives. The WNBA and its gamers, in all of their intersectional energy and sweetness, are nonetheless ready for society to catch up.
Preventing to shift how the marketplace views and values girls athletes has been on the middle of my whole profession as a sports activities agent. For Brittney, crucial issues I might do to help her profession and guarantee she maximized alternative have been 1) to make her as a lot cash on the court docket, as rapidly as potential and a couple of) to all the time inform her the reality, do my finest to guard her and be there for her, it doesn't matter what. Earlier than that February morning, that included advising her (together with a number of different shoppers) to make the most of the chance to play in Russia for the best paying workforce on the planet. Ever since that day, it has meant working furiously to attempt to summon each useful resource I can to assist her, in order that I can hold one other promise I made after she was formally charged and minutes earlier than she was led away. “BG,” I mentioned, “We love you. We're right here. Be courageous. We'll get you house.”
So whereas her detention has risen to the highest of reports for its geopolitical relevance, supercharged by superstar, at its underbelly lies a narrative of gender-pay disparity right here in the USA.
I spend hours in communication on daily basis with a devoted group of people who find themselves working to get BG house. It's a neighborhood full of activists — together with WNBA gamers who’ve led a few of our most essential cultural conversations in recent times. It’s a neighborhood that chooses its phrases rigorously, that’s used to transferring collectively as a unit. For now, that neighborhood is doing its finest to belief in BG’s authorized workforce and believe within the White Home’s dedication to doing every little thing of their energy to deliver Brittney house. But as the method performs out, understanding that we can't get into the small print of her case, I have to speak about why Brittney was in Russia within the first place.
These unfamiliar with the layered challenges girls face in skilled sports activities will most likely marvel why an athlete so completed — a three-time All-American, ESPY award winner, seven-time All-Star, All-WNBA choice, two-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA champion universally favored with a megawatt smile who offers the warmest hugs you’ll ever obtain, set an NCAA report (amongst men and women) for blocked pictures, retains footwear within the trunk of her to automotive to offer to individuals experiencing houselessness round Phoenix and does volunteer work with children who're bullied as she was as a baby — would wish to depart the USA to search out offseason work.
The truth is that greater than half of the ladies within the WNBA presently complement their incomes by enjoying for skilled golf equipment abroad from the top of the WNBA season to the beginning of the following. Up to now, the most important contracts paid to girls basketball gamers have come from Russian and Turkish golf equipment. Prime athletes could make six to seven instances the utmost WNBA wage abroad — and the disparity as just lately as 2019 was 10 to fifteen instances greater than WNBA salaries. Then you definately consider endorsements, with a first-round NBA draft decide securing a median of 10 instances greater than girls of the identical caliber through shoe contracts. That’s about $500,000 to $1 million of misplaced income per 12 months the ladies are going abroad to make up. Many of the gamers who select to play abroad get solely every week or two off between the top of 1 season and of the beginning of their subsequent. In actual fact, the EGOT of girls’s basketball has been to seize NCAA, WNBA, Olympic and Euroleague titles.
It’s no secret that ladies in skilled sports activities are paid lots lower than males. There is no such thing as a magic WNBA commissioner wand that may permit Cathy Englebert to instantly pay gamers larger salaries — and demanding that the Girls’s Nationwide Basketball Gamers Affiliation negotiate a bigger share of income for gamers gained’t make a lot of a distinction with out extra income progress.
And but the identical system that rendered a lady who's a generational expertise practically invisible till she was detained in Russia affords a wealthy ecosystem of revenue alternatives which are virtually solely out there for males.
The important thing to unlocking financial alternative for girls in sports activities lies in elevated funding throughout 4 key, interconnected areas — media, sponsorships, merchandise and ticketing.
Greater media investments and extra networks committing to airing girls’s sports activities in common, recurring programming blocks have been proven to extend consciousness and lead to extra followers tuning in.
Elevated sponsorships, in flip — and a reimagined utility of sponsor dollars that prioritize and correctly worth girls’s leagues, groups and particular person athletes — will make it potential for extra girls to maintain (and for extra women to aspire to) wholesome and significant careers in sports activities. Sponsor dollars paid on to WNBA stars would offer the quickest, most direct path to dramatically lower the variety of gamers who go abroad to complement their revenue.
And investments in merchandise that includes and celebrating girls’s sports activities groups and athletes may even deepen fan participation and assist develop the neighborhood round girls’s sports activities. Proper now, demand is already outpacing provide and merch is just too arduous to search out as it's — as anybody who’s ever tried to search out the WNBA emblem to buy on the Fanatics homepage will know.
Now we have now a high-stakes instance of how financial disparity can have terrifying penalties. This is the reason I'm calling on firms to decide to investing 3 times the sources in girls’s sports activities that they spend money on males’s, to assist speed up sports activities business parity. Information reveals that a greenback spent on girls’s sports activities is the most effective greenback spent in sports activities as a result of it supplies an outsized return for manufacturers. So whereas spending equally on women and men is an effective begin (and must be celebrated, but additionally be the agreed-upon minimal), any firm that actually desires to steer in closing the hole might want to do extra. It’s time to actually, measurably wager on girls.
The funding is sensible and its overdue.
With the lives and freedom of gamers at stake, we will’t afford to attend or to proceed to simply accept the identical errors.
We should acknowledge our shared accountability and take motion.
A rise of 3 times can also be symbolic. The 75-year-old NBA is 3 times older than the 25- year-old WNBA — and 3 times evokes the “rule of three,” a “just-right” Goldilocks take a look at and, for good measure, is the jersey variety of Diana Taurasi, who was just lately voted the WNBA’s GOAT by its followers, is one among Brittney’s teammates and was my very first consumer as an agent. If Diana was measured by success, charisma and talent — and if not for being a lady — she would absolutely be the world’s most well-known athlete.
In the end, a extra significant dedication from the broader sports activities neighborhood is required to maintain progress for the league and its stars in all the mandatory mediums. And transparency can also be key.
If firms undertake an method much like the brand new local weather guidelines proposed by the U.S. Securities and Change Fee — which can quickly require firms to reveal details about their affect on local weather change — I consider they are going to be rewarded by shoppers, who anticipate manufacturers to take a stand.
For instance, disclosure from different forms of manufacturers may element what was allotted to girls’s leagues versus males’s leagues, what athletes have been paid and details about whether or not women and men have been compensated equally for his or her companies. A fair deeper dive might reveal how these investments elevated Black girls; Black, Brown, Asian or Indigenous creatives; athletes with disabilities; non-binary or trans athletes; or different traditionally underrepresented teams.
In an business that celebrates and thrives on competitors, firms that take the initiative proper now to steer — taking actions like conducting inner audits, articulating a transparent imaginative and prescient for the progress they wish to make, sharing success tales and being clear about their dedication — will reap the advantages of being the primary out of the gate.
By the point the world first realized about what occurred to Brittney, a wave of shock had already hit the tightly knit girls’s basketball neighborhood. Because it rippled out by means of media into residing rooms, Zoom conferences, enterprise dinners and bars throughout the nation that had, till then, not typically contained conversations about girls in sports activities, curiosity in Brittney Griner and the WNBA spiked.
As we, Brittney’s household and mates, attempt to compartmentalize our anguish over the unknowns, working whereas additionally holding our breath for her secure return, what higher solution to make her proud than to do every little thing we will to make sure that what’s occurring to her now won't ever occur once more?
We owe it to Brittney to make sure this historical past doesn't repeat, in order that no different participant, household or neighborhood must expertise this once more.
BG, I’m nonetheless with you. All of us are. And we will’t wait to indicate you all of the change you’re inspiring.
Lindsay Kagawa Colas is the chief vp for Expertise and The Collective at Wasserman, the place she represents basketball stars Brittney Griner, Diana Taurasi, Sue Hen, Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart and Paige Bueckers, in addition to high Olympic and Paralympic athletes. She secured the primary maternity protections and first inclusion rider in shoe and attire contracts.
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